If you’ve tried out the Livesearch Beta at Alltheweb, you’ve seen Yahoo experimenting with displaying alternative queries, topic categories, spelling corrections, and search results as you are typing, and even before you have finished entering your query terms.

How do they determine which results appear, and what factors might they use to choose which things to show searchers?

In addition to looking at the Livesearch Beta, there are a couple of newly published patent applications from Yahoo which explore predictive suggestions, including presenting results from databases other than Web searches.

Interestingly, one of the factors listed in biasing which results show during predictive queries is “potential revenue generation” for the search engine.

Providing an alternative search query to a predicted search query is disclosed herein. A search query is received from a client node. Prior to receiving an indication from the client node that the search query is completely formed, the following steps are performed:

1) a predicted search query is determined by predicting what the search query will be when completed; and

2) an alternative search query that differs from the predicted search query is determined based on the predicted search query.

The alternative search query is provided to the client node. The alternative search query may be something that the user search query is unlikely to complete to. For example, in response to the user entering a search query of “brittany sp”, an alternative search query with a spelling suggestion of “britney spears” is determined and provided to the user.

Examples of biases that can be applied include, but are not limited to, temporal biases and monetization biases.

Temporal biasing involves increasing a weight associated with a search query, based on a temporal attribute associated with the query. Search queries may also have associated with them a parameter such as frequency, count, etc. One of these parameters may serve as a weight.

In order to determine suggested search queries, the temporal attribute is used to modify or bias the parameter (e.g., frequency parameter). Thus, the weight of the search query is modified to temporally bias the query. The suggested search queries are determined based on the biased parameter.

Potential Suggestions and Results

Types of possible suggestions and results displayed may include such things as:

Further, the bias can be other than temporal, such as a monetization bias. For example, a search query is assigned a monetization attribute based on its association with revenue generation. As a particular example, a search query that is associated with shopping might be assigned a relatively high monetization attribute.

d) Language of the query and the language of the user

e) Country of origin of the search query can be used, with a bias given towards queries that have the same country of origin as the user.

f) Ontology – topics of a query might be gleaned from topics of queries and selections in immediate past searches.

Conclusion

I don’t know if these patent applications and the livesearch beta are indications of what Yahoo might become more like in the future, but both provide some potential insight into possibilities involving personalization and attempts to match the intent of searchers.

I was a little surprised to see a monetization bias as a possible part of deciding which query suggestions and results to display during the predictive query process, though the language in the patent applications about that bias isn’t detailed enough to give a clear idea of what them mean exactly with the use of that bias.

I do like Yahoo’s search suggestion tool with predictive phrases when you type in keywords. Although I have to agree with you when you talk about their monetization bias as a possible part of deciding which query suggestions and results to display. I run a perfume and cologne website and when I type in our suggested keywords, there really isn’t any phrase suggestions like there should be.

It’s tempting to consider that there might be a monetization bias behind displaying predictive queries. Hopefully most search engines recognize at this point that even a slight perception of that kind of bias might alienate users of their search engine.

I expect that some queries aren’t going to display suggestions, either to avoid the appearance of that kind of bias, or because there may not be a good match for the query terms in question.

SEO by the Sea focuses upon SEO as the search engines tell us about it, from sources such as patents and white papers from the search engines. This information about SEO is tempered by years of experience from the author of the site, who has been doing SEO since the days when search engines started appearing on the Web.